Making MIDI music?

[Goat]

After nearly completing the STRAIN megawad, the music has already inspired me to attempt to create my own. the only thing is, i dont know how to go about doing that. i have some background in music, ive taken piano, bass, and electric guitar but i never got too good at either of them, but im familiar with notation and tablature. what program did they use to make the music, it is all VERY good. it doesnt have to be a free program, so toss me some names of commercial progs too, thanks in advance

[Silverwyvern]

A friend had a keyboard with hookups so you could play and it'd record on your comp as a midi.
Neat. but not free ;)

[Grazza]

I don't have any useful suggestions for programs, but I suspect Mark Klem's music page will be of interest to you.

[Remilia Scarlet]

When I write midi music, which is all the time (for both Doom and for my one-man band), I use CakeWalk Pro Audio. It's a very nice program. You can get a staff view, as well as a multi-track view. Here's a screenshot as an example: http://www.du.edu/~ahunt/cakewalk.JPG

Now, you can either record midis by hooking up a keyboard via a MIDI connection to your computer and hit record (real-time recording, iow), or you can use your mouse and click notes into the staff (which is how I usually do it after figuring out what to play on my synth). You can either use a software synth or hardware with it (though, I recommend hardware...). And while this isn't in CakeWalk 9.0, I know that in older versions you can "draw" controllers (i.e. Volume, Panpot, Expression, Reverb amount, etc.), on top of inserting them other ways. You can also view a MIDI by looking at each midi message on a table.

It's an easy program, imo, and also quite powerful. Has a bunch of cool stuff, including a scripting language (CAL).

And if you ever want, you can also import digital audio and movies into it. I've imported digital audio only once before, so...

[Sharessa]

Silverwyvern said:

A friend had a keyboard with hookups so you could play and it'd record on your comp as a midi.
Neat. but not free ;)

I wish I had one of those. It would make my life so much easier.